On Thu, July 2, 2020 2:07 pm, Israel Dahl wrote: > @Laura thanks for wanting to help! I think our goals overlap well, and > could do with more hands on deck. My main goal for ToriOS is to make > things easy to use, and look fairly nice on as old of hardware as > possible.
I'm still working on/trying to find lightweight alternatives that will work better on older systems than a lot of the typical programs offered. I really like how ToriOS makes good use of the FLTK GUI. Will be trying to put together patches on some of the FLTK programs I use and upload them soon. There are only about 3 or 4 other distributions I know about that specifically try to make use of FLTK programs (including NanoLinux, TinyCore Linux, 4Mlinux). I'm also looking into SDL based applications and trying to determine whether it's better to use the latest version of SDL (which takes more resources) or try to continue to work with SDL 1.2.15. I'm trying to backport some helper libraries to 1.2.15 now, but I'm also looking at adding SDL 2.x support to some SDL 1.2.15 applications. Would be interested in hearing opinions from others on which SDL version they prefer. > I really want to join forces with all the small distros to form a common > base, or some way to share all our niche programs. I think this would be > the most helpful! I think the main distribution that actively tries to reach users with older machines is Puppy Linux. They have several custom programs as well. They also have several tools to build distributions automatically including one that uses Debian as a base. However, there would be some differences with how ToriOS does things such as the package manager and making more use of the root user. One of my favorite distributions that's based on Debian is AntiX. Don't know if we can share any resources with them, but AntiX works very well on older hardware. It has some nice custom software that works well on low resource machines too. Plus, it's systemd free for those who don't like systemd being so inclusive and trying to do several jobs instead of one job well. Would be interested to see some statistics on whether systemd or its alternatives work better on older computers, but my guess is that it's going to depend on the hardware. One other advantage is that it has several tools for doing respins in ISO or flash drive format. The other small Linux distributions I've looked at are working with the musl C library instead of glibc. I recently heard from the developer of Cucumber Linux. He's stopped that project and is now working on fidelix but it's oriented to server use and uses pkgsrc (which he said is working out very well). If we switched to musl, the system would be more lightweight and would allow for static compilation. However, you'd lose compatibility with Debian unless you could pull off something similar to what Bedrock Linux does. Some of the lightweight programs that the musl based distributions use might be helpful though. Also, Debian does allow for installation of the musl compiler along with the standard gcc/glibc compiler. Might be interesting to see if packages or programs compiled with the different C libraries could coexist in some easier way. There are also options like TinyCore Linux. However, I wonder how well that works for older computers since it's geared to using as much RAM as possible. I think ToriOS and AntiX are the main distributions I know when it comes to targeting older systems and remaining Debian based. Also, many distributions are moving away from 32 bit support and offering only 64 bit support. Might be worth looking into how likely it is that Debian will go this route as well and what to do in case that happens. I've noticed several forums mentioning issues with getting a modern browser that works in 32 bit as well. That could be a serious issue at some point and already is with some other distributions. Sincerely, Laura http://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~torios Post to : torios@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~torios More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
